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 ===Gerhard Bienek, who directed biological safety for Dugway Proving
Ground between 1989 and 1993, says the base was appallingly sloppy
in handling deadly material ranging from anthrax spores to
cyanide.
===Asked if someone could have stolen anthrax, he said, yes, in
the earlier lab setup that was in effect when he was there.
However, a new laboratory has been built since then and he does
not know of the security now in effect. He added he knows of no
situation where officials discovered anthrax was missing.
===Bienek, of Huntsville, Weber County, is no longer working,
as he has worker's disability with congestive heart failure and
continuous headaches. He says he dropped a federal lawsuit against
the base because of family health problems.
===The western Utah base is charged with developing ways to
detect and protect against chemical and biological agents. It must
use deadly material in its research.
===Back when he was at Dugway, Bienek said, the base had
problems with security and with tracking the deadly inventory.
===Liquid-nitrogen-cooled freezers storing anthrax and other
organisms were "in the hallways, and you could open here and there
a freezer and take out what you wanted," he said. The modern
laboratory presumably has far better controls.
===Bienek said not only was anthrax stored in an unsafe manner
when he was there, "In general, the storage of the chemicals
needed for the laboratory and also the biological organisms were
sloppily kept."
===When making an inventory, "I found out that there was
supposed to be more of the anthrax in there than there actually
was," he said. The volume was wrong in the records.
==="We cannot address allegations regarding what he believes
may or may not have happened in the former Life Sciences Test
Laboratory nine years ago," responded Phillip Washburn, public
affairs officer for the Army Test and Evaluation Command,
Alexandria, Va.
==="The security at the Dugway Life Sciences Test Facility is
recognized throughout the Army as being the best possible security
for biological safety and is used as a model for other agencies,"
he said.
===Dugway is one of several bases and laboratories around the
United States that the FBI is investigating concerning the source
of anthrax spores used in letter attacks. The strain of anthrax
used in the terror mailings apparently is the same as that used in
these labs.
===Only a tiny amount of the bacteria would have been needed to
cause contamination and death.
===Bienek recalled a meeting when an official of one of
Dugway's laboratories asked the base commander to sign a document
stating the base would have only a little more than laboratory
amounts of anthrax. That would be slightly more than 5 to 10
milliliters, he said in a telephone interview Thursday.
==="The commander signed it," he said.
But then Bienek discovered that base personnel wanted to
produce 30 gallons of the deadly spores. That would have amounted
to 113,600 milliliters, or at least 11,000 times the "laboratory
amounts."
===With 30 gallons of anthrax, he said, it would be easy to
"take a few milligrams out . . . and you would never detect it."
If the base really did produce that much "you would never know
what is missing."
===Did the base actually produce 30 gallons of anthrax?
===The base could have, he said, because it was "just their
character," their way of doing business.
==="Dugway always said one thing and then they did another
one."
===At another point, he happened to be at the University of
Utah Hospital because of his medical problems. A doctor there,
noting that his form said he was from Dugway, mentioned that the
base is working with polio.
===The doctor knew this, Bienek said, because the base had to
inform the hospital about disease organisms it was working with,
in case the hospital had to respond to an illness caused by the
organisms.
===Bienek responded that Dugway was working with a non-virulent
form of polio, called avirulent polio.
===The doctor exclaimed, "What? Avirulent form, my foot!" He
pulled a description from his desk to show Bienek.
==="In reality it was the virulent form."
===An agreement between the Army and the state held that Dugway
would not import disease organisms, he said. However, an official
at the base "imported Rift Valley fever (organisms) from Africa,
and that is a very, very, very virulent disease."
===An official of the Centers for Disease Control, Atlanta,
visited the base and asked Bienek about the Rift Valley fever and
he said he didn't know about it.
===Bienek said that while he was at Dugway he leveled
criticisms because laboratory workers wore lab frocks outside the
lab as casual clothing. The frocks could have been contaminated,
he said.
==="You're supposed to have the laboratory uniforms in the lab,
and then you're supposed to take a shower and change into the
clean clothes. . . . That obviously didn't happen."
===Workers wore lab clothes "when they worked in the offices
and when they went around in the corridors."
===He called this sloppy and unprofessional.
===Officials launched an investigation at the English Village
living quarters at Dugway when someone called about concerns of
boxes stored in a shed belonging to a neighbor.
===Military police officers asked Bienek to be present when
they went through chemicals in the sheds, to help watch for
danger. There were three or four big boxes full of chemicals, he
said.
===The man who had the chemicals said they had been thrown out
and he had obtained them from a Dumpster. Another Dugway worker
"told me that he saw the man sitting in the Dumpster digging out
boxes," he said.
==="There were several kilograms of cyanide and they were
dumped in the Dumpster right next to acid and vinegar . . . right
in the same boxes," Bienek said.
===If the cyanide had mixed with acid, that could have caused
the release of a cloud of toxic gas.
===Bienek asked a professor at Utah State University, Logan, to
analyze the chemicals. "He said there would have been enough gas
in there to kill all the people in English Village."
===He also discovered a bottle that seemed heavy. Opening it
inside a protective hood, he found that it was filled with sand,
but inside that was another vial.
===An analyst said the vial needed further analysis "but right
now it looks like that it is nerve gas."
===Bienek commented. "They had either for smuggling out or for
laziness had deposited and thrown this in the Dumpster."
===Army officials wanted to charge the man with stealing, but Bienek said he believed he had picked up the material from the
Dumpster and was not a thief. He said that if they tried to force
him to testify, he would "point the finger that you mismanaged . .
. the poisonous toxic chemicals."
===That was near the end of his time at Dugway, he said.
===Meanwhile, he has kept copies of all his correspondences
about incidents at Dugway, so he could prove what was going on. He
estimated he has 50 pounds of documents.
===Several months ago, FBI agents interviewed him. They "took
some of the documents," he said.
===He does not know of any instances where anthrax was stolen,
though he thinks that is possible. "It's just a uniform
mismanagement by Dugway."
===In addition to the federal suit that he dropped, Bienek
said, he won an earlier action against Dugway in which he claimed
he had been libeled before other base personnel. The Army settled
that action with an apology and allowed him to choose another job
on base, he said.
===Washburn said that in today's laboratory, "on a daily basis,
numerous security checks of biological holdings and the Biological
Safety Level 3 (highest protection) area take place.
==="The 'Buddy System' is also used," he said. No individual
has access to any of the biological holdings without being
monitored.
==="Personnel with access to the area must have top-level
clearances. In addition to these security measures, additional
safety measures are also in force.
==="And inventory shows that all anthrax at Dugway is accounted
for."
===Since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, Washburn added,
"security has been increased to even higher levels."
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